44 JACKSON HOTEL Sometimes after hours of wine I can almost see the night gliding in low off the harbor down the long avenues of shopwindows that star each ceiling. I must tel] you I am afraid to sit here losing myself to the hour's slow erasure past mannequins, perfect in their gestures. I leave water steaming on the gas ring and sometimes I can slip from my body, until I know myself only by this cold weight, this hand on my lap, palm up. I want to still the dancer's hands almost find the single word to prevent evenings that absolve nothing, a winter lived alone and cold. Rooms where you somehow marry the losses of strangers that tremble on the walls, like the hands of the dancer next door luminous in mine, to talk about forgiveness and what we leave behind-faces and cities, the small emergencies of nights. I say nothing but, leaning on the sill, I watch her leave at that moment with Methedrine; she taps walls for hours murmuring about the silver she swears lines the building, the hallways w hen the first taxis start rolling to the lights of Chinatown, powered by sad and human desire. I watch her fade where each night drunks stammer their usual Rosary until they come to rest beneath the tarnished numbers, the bulbs too, was "strictly for incoming NMCC conference calls." That is obviously incorrect, since NORAD is supposed to notify the President of a nuclear attack, not vice versa. I spoke with General Wagoner again, and he eXplained what had happened. "The black phone is an outgoing phone," he said. "I just flat screwed up." At the time, he had been in charge of NORAD combat oper- ations for only a few months, he con- tinued, and was not completely familiar with the communications procedures. He was embarrassed that he had given me a "dumb, dumb demonstration" of NORAD's communications capabilities. There is a high level of redundancy, he emphasized, with several alternative means of transmitting vital messages always available-radio, microwave, satellite, other telephone hookups. When I pressed him for information about the specific problem with the call he had tried to place to the Pentagon's National Military Command Center, he said, "I didn't know that I had to dial '0' to get the operator." Despite the multiple communica- tions system, NORAD will have pre- cious little time to search for a work- ing backup once Soviet missiles have been launched. Moreover, according to several recent Pentagon studies, it may be very hard to find any working communications circuits after Soviet bombs have begun to fal] on American soil. This will be an especially severe probleP1 if-as seems likely to the down the street until she's a smudge, violet in the circle of my breath. A figure so small I can cup her in my hands. -LYNDA HULL . . Pentagon-the key United States military command posts and message- relay stations are the highest-priority targets of a major Soviet attack. In that case, the President will be put in the difficult position of having to make an extremely quick decision on whether the attack that appears on NORAD computer screens is real and, if he thinks it is, whether to order the launching of Minuteman missiles and other nuclear forces in retaliation. If he does not give the orders quickly, he may not be able to give them at all, for neither the White House nor the com- munications lines it depends on are likely to survive the initial phase of a shrewdly planned Soviet first strike. Officials caution that the "horror stories" detailed in the Pentagon's studies of United States wartime com- munications capabilities are too sensi- tive to discuss in detail. "Documents on this subj ect that were labelled 'SE- CRET' two years ago are now 'Top SECRET,'" a member of one of the government panels that have investi- gated the problem told me. Some of the reports have been put under a special security classification whose code name is itself classified. Still, much of the information about the command-and- control system is widely available else- where. All the government facilities that will be discussed in this article have been described in documents the Pentagon has made public. They have also been discussed openly in Con- gress, in defense and scientific j our- nals, and elsewhere on the public rec- ord. Therefore, it is possible without encroaching upon protected informa- tion to outline the basic problems with the methods that are supposed to trig- ger the launching of a United States retaliatory strike. A FRIEND who is interested in guns invited me to have lunch with him and his wife one weekend a while back and to join them in pistol practice afterward. W e used a double- action Smith & Wesson .38-calibre re- volver. One can fire it simply by pull- ing the trigger, which is rather stiff, or by cocking the hammer first and then gently squeezing the firing mech- anism. It is easier to fire the gun when it is cocked, and a number of times as I took aim it seemed to go off by itself. "That's a conventional trigger," my